Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Mine Your Own Business: Anti-Activist Film

By

Jennifer,

The readers of your blog may be interested in the new anti-activist movie, ‘Mine Your Own Business’. The page loads slowly, but patience will be rewarded with the film trailer: http://www.mineyourownbusiness.org/index.htm .

Schiller.

And this is what the Director of the movie had to say:

“I remember a time, not so long ago, when the man with the sandwich board warning the world that the end is nigh was a comic figure. He appeared in cartoons and comedy sketch shows as the clownish, nerdish figure that others made jokes about.

Similarly it is not long ago that the bearded man, with the religious collar and evangelical zeal, warned us to change our ways or we would be visited by plagues and pestilence was viewed as a throwback to a conservative, less sophisticated past.

Most educated westerners feel that no longer believing these spreaders of doom and apocalypse is a sign of progress and how our society has matured.

But remove the glasses and the grubby raincoat from the man with the sandwich board and replace it with an ethnic shirt, maybe a pair of sandals and write on the sandwich board that we are all going to be damned because the oil will run out, Or maybe the message is that we are all going to be doomed because we have cut down the forests or because of global warming and suddenly we take the man with the sandwich board very seriously indeed.

Similarly remove the collar from the man with the evangelical zeal and make him a member of an environmental organisation and suddenly we start paying serious attention to these modern day prophets of doom.

Once, according to our religious leaders, it was our sins that were leading us to damnation. Now, according to our environmental leaders, it is polluting actions of man that will lead to our damnation.

How little we have all progressed and how we still love to listen to harbingers of doom would be mildly amusing if it were not for the pernicious effects of such beliefs on the poorest people in some of the poorest countries in the world.

Hundreds of years after we have become rich and comfortable by removing our forests and exploiting our natural resources such as coal, oil, and gold we are now going to the poorest countries on the planet to prevent them from doing what we did and having what we have. We want them to stay as ‘traditional peasants’ forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted.

‘Mine Your Own Business’ will make a lot of comfortable western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion-the religion of environmentalism.

Phelim McAleer
July 2006″

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Pinxi says

    Is this film not an act of activism itself?

    Schiller I suggest you see the movie Manderlay (sp?) by Lars von Trier to you. Similar vein, similar lessons about the motives of activists. Pls let me know what you think of it

  3. david@tokyo says

    I’d like to see it as well, although the thing that really attracts me is the idea of reporting the views of the people affected by the campaigns of these anti-you-name-it groups, as they rarely seem to get a proper say. I’m not drawing conclusions here, other than that the debate that we do have on these issues today is thoroughly inadequate. That’s why I’ve recently taken an interest in translating articles that appear in Japanese newspapers on my blog.

  4. Ian Mott says

    Mark Twain had a great quip about the Hawaiians who had lived their lives for millenia without ever knowing of the existence of Hell.

  5. Schiller Thurkettle says

    The movie “Mine Your Own Business” is accumulating some buzz in the blogosphere.

    http://cheatseekingmissiles.blogspot.com/2006/09/greenies-campaign-against-poor.html

    Greenies’ Campaign Against The Poor

    Regular readers know how disgusting I think wealthy European and American environmentalists are, cushioned and comforted on all sides by their nations’ advanced technology, because they routinely impose their beliefs on struggling third-world families. My most recent post on the subject was about the Greenies’ cavalier killing of thousands of Africans and Asians by refusing to allow DDT to be used to control malaria.

    Another disgusting example is in today’s Rocky Mountain News, authored by leftist journalist turned anti-environmentalist documentary film maker Phelim McAleer, whose new film Mine Your Own Business…

    http://www.evaneco.com/?p=74

    You know as well as I do how self-righteous the left can be, and this film does a great job of exposing crazy environmentalists for what they really are – more interested in following their “principles” than in actually helping people. It turns out that by opposing business and development projects around the world, these groups are trying to keep people poor! You always hear enviros talk about “preserving a way of life,” but what that really means is preserving a state of extreme poverty and helplessness…

    http://littlemissattila.mu.nu/archives/198367.php

    Mine Your Own Business

    This looks like a pretty interesting examination of the dysfunctional relationship between the world’s poor and the environmental extremists who appear to want them as human exhibits in a sort of global zoo.

    “Poverty,” the film proclaims, “is not charming.”

    http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2006/09/environmentalis.html

    Environmentalists are new foes of some of the world’s poorest

    From the Rocky Mountain News: Environmentalists are new foes of some of the world’s poorest, Opinion by Phelim McaLeer. Greate article. I hope his movie makes it to Kansas City.